James Foster Reed: Stories

A small town laughs at the first automobile as a noisy nuisance, but over a decade the joke slowly reverses itself: blacksmiths, bankers, farmers, doctors, and even the town’s fiercest horse loyalists discover that the motorcar is not a passing toy, but the future arriving muddy, loud, useful, and inevitable.

Parliament is in Session is a darkly comic dispatch from the edge of the woods, where domestic life, folklore, and one very sensible dog meet beneath a tree that absolutely knows more than it is saying.

Roam and Jewels chance meet at a park and become fast friends, against all odds.

For nine years, Snake Island’s timber rattlesnakes have been a conservation success. Then animals begin dying, sightings spread, and rats pour from Calder’s abandoned mill. Everyone knows the snakes are safely isolated offshore. Everyone may be wrong. As spring turns to summer, a struggling Massachusetts town faces an ecological disaster born from good intentions, bad assumptions, and a species protected by law.

A romantic dinner, a charming entomologist, and one very enthusiastic off-menu dish. Technically Edible is a comedy of manners about the distance between good intentions and good judgment. Measured, in this case, in legs.

Her name is Twix. It's the one she picked. She pulls espresso, keeps the tip jar exactly one hand's width from the edge, notices what everyone's hands are doing, and does not explain herself. It's a good life. She chose it. The rest is her business, and she is very good at keeping what's hers.